About Me

Wel­come to my blog! If you are strug­gling with spend­ing mon­ey and want to learn how to reframe your mon­ey mind­set, this is the place to be!

I orig­i­nal­ly start­ed this blog to doc­u­ment my jour­ney to Finan­cial Inde­pen­dence. My goal was to help guide my fel­low mil­len­ni­als along sim­i­lar paths to finan­cial free­dom. Mil­len­ni­als are the group of peo­ple born any­where from rough­ly the ear­ly eight­ies to the 2000’s.

A lot of the finan­cial blogs out there are ded­i­cat­ed to liv­ing fru­gal­ly, sav­ing mon­ey, and invest­ing as much as possible.

My blog is not one of them.

When I start­ed this blog, I was 25 and 100% ded­i­cat­ed to achiev­ing finan­cial inde­pen­dence as fast as pos­si­ble. I thought I could save $635,000 in 10 years and be done with the cor­po­rate world for the rest of my life. After I saved $200,000 in 5 years by age 27, I start­ed to real­ize maybe that was­n’t the best path for me.

For one, my plan required me to min­i­mize my expens­es and stuff my invest­ment accounts as much as pos­si­ble. The arti­fi­cial lim­i­ta­tions start­ed to chafe after a few years. My plan also required that I con­tin­ue to live at that same lean lev­el.…. and that was going to be a problem.

Now that I have a hefty nest egg saved up and a few more years of life under my belt, I’ve made some dif­fer­ent decisions.

I sup­pose I should intro­duce myself a bit bet­ter. I’m Gwen. I’m 33, locat­ed in St. Louis, Mis­souri, engaged to the most amaz­ing part­ner, the proud ser­vant of my Siber­ian For­est Cat Bartholomew, and am some­what hap­pi­ly employed in the IT sec­tor. From an ear­ly age, I’ve always had an obses­sion with mon­ey. When I was younger, I was obsessed with obtain­ing more of it so I could have more things, name­ly can­dy from the gas sta­tion and replace­ment fees for lost library cards. Seri­ous­ly, I don’t know what it was about those slip­pery lit­tle bug­gers, but I must’ve lost at least a dozen cards. Same goes for house keys.

If you would like to read more about my back­ground, check out Back­ground: Part 1 and the oth­er half of the sto­ry in Part 2.

Now.….….. I am work­ing on eas­ing off that obtain­ing more mon­ey obses­sion since I already have more saved up than future Gwen will ever need. I’m focused on hav­ing a healthy rela­tion­ship with mon­ey which includes rea­son­able sav­ing and spend­ing lev­els. I’m not sure what the future holds, but I know I’ll be doc­u­ment­ing it right here for you to read!

So, with all that being said, wel­come to FIRE‑y Mil­len­ni­als! Bet­ter buck­le up because it’s going to be a wild ride!